It was Zimmerman, acquitted by a jury in July of second-degree murder in the death of Trayvon Martin, who led the charge to bring to justice for a black man assaulted by a white teenager in 2011.

In “If I Had a Son,” Cashill brings to light the Sherman Ware incident and Zimmerman’s crusade for justice, writing:

“In fact, Zimmerman made about as unlikely a racist poster child as America could produce. In December 2010 a police lieutenant’s son, Justin Collison, sucker punched a black homeless man named Sherman Ware outside a bar [in Sanford, Fla.] Although Ware suffered a concussion and there was video evidence of Collison’s attack, no action was taken against Collison, who is white, for nearly a month. Reuters reporter Daniel Trotta talked about the incident in his April 3 analysis of the early days of the Trayvon phenomenon; he made no mention of Zimmerman’s role in that controversy.

“That role was a significant one. Upset at the lack of media attention the Ware case was getting, Zimmerman and his wife, Shellie, printed fliers demanding that the community hold accountable officers responsible for misconduct. They then passed fliers out to area churches. At a public meeting in January 2011, Zimmerman took the floor and said, ‘I would just like to state that the law is written in black and white. It should not and cannot be enforced in the gray for those that are in the thin blue line.’ The meeting was recorded on video. As a result of the publicity, police chief Brian Tooley, whom Zimmerman blasted for his ‘illegal cover-up and corruption,’ was forced to resign, and Collison was arrested. Zimmerman headlined his fliers with a famous quote from Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.'”

Cashill said this is the “wannabe cop,” as the media described Zimmerman.

Zimmerman, he said, worked with “the local NAACP and Natalie Jackson – who would become part of Team Trayvon – to seek justice for Ware, and they all betrayed him after the incident with Trayvon Martin, because it was in their best interest to pretend they didn’t know who he was.”

The story of Zimmerman’s crusade has largely gone unreported, through mainstream media indifference and the labeling of anyone who mentions it as “racist,” said Cashill

“Robert Zimmerman tried to get out this story, but Natalie Jackson said that he was playing the ‘race card’ (calling Zimmerman a racist), and the mainstream media didn’t want to know this side of Zimmerman, because they had their narrative and they didn’t want any information to get out that contradicted it,” Cashill wrote.

Natalie Jackson was one of the attorneys retained by Trayvon Martin’s family.

“Sherman Ware’s sister even spoke at a Justice for Trayvon rally, even though she had to have known about the role Zimmerman played in the crusade for justice he spearheaded for her brother,” Cashill pointed out.

Roger Aronoff, editor of Accuracy in Media, said this of Cashill’s illuminating look at the Zimmerman/Martin affair:

“If the reader had any doubt that media bias was at the heart of the George Zimmerman trial, Jack Cashill’s powerful new book, ‘If I Had a Son,’ puts this misconception to rest. Armed with example after example of purposeful media falsifications, lies, and deceptions, Cashill explores how the black grievance industry (BGI) and the race-mongering mainstream media manufactured a narrative that Zimmerman was an over-vigilant cop wannabe who stalked Trayvon Martin to his untimely death. The real story is quite different: The teenage Martin had been suspended from school on multiple occasions, and had a recent preoccupation with guns—none of which was known to Zimmerman when their paths met.

“In contrast, Zimmerman was known to others as a ‘tugboat’ – a man of faith willing to offer assistance to neighbors of all races when they were down on their luck, or needed a helping hand. For his actions as a neighborhood watch captain, Zimmerman was crucified by both the media and the BGI as a racist. In the end, the jury’s not guilty verdict was correctly based on the specific evidence relative to this case, and to the charges Zimmerman faced.

“Cashill effectively confronts the misleading media deceptions which race-baited the nation over this tragedy, offering a point-by-point analysis of each chronological piece of the puzzle, criticizing such public figures as Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson. Readers will come away with an entirely different understanding of the trial—different from the false bill of goods sold by the media.”

“If I Had a Son” tells how for the first time in the history of American jurisprudence, a state government, the U.S. Department of Justice, the White House, the major media, the entertainment industry and the vestiges of the civil rights movement conspired to put an innocent man in prison for the rest of his life.

All that stood between Zimmerman and lifetime internment were two folksy local lawyers, their aides, and some very dedicated citizen journalists, most notably an unpaid handful of truth seekers at the blogging collective known as the Conservative Treehouse. “If I Had a Son” takes an inside look at this unprecedented battle formation.

“If I Had a Son” tells the story, too, of the six stalwart female jurors who ignored the enormous pressure mounting around them and preserved America’s belief in its judicial system.

In the wake of the verdict, skeptics in the Martin camp claimed that the state of Florida did not play to win. In the course of his research, Cashill came across some startling evidence, which suggests that those skeptics may indeed be right.

“If I Had A Son” is the one and only comprehensive look at the most politically significant trial in decades.

What George Zimmerman learned in the course of his ordeal is that although he supported Obama, and lobbied for Obama, and voted for Obama at least once, in the final analysis he did not look enough like Obama to be his son, and that made all the difference.